Someone posted this long statement below, issued by 73 members of DSA before the 2016 elections, on their facebook page. I think he considered it a keen piece of political analysis. I don’t. At all. I  wonder if any of the 73 have reconsidered its wisdom in light of the present situation, including the string of anti-democratic decisions this term by the gang of 5 on the Supreme Court. Today we will hear the court’s determination on Janus. I’m expecting the worst. Had Hillary been elected it is more than likely that none of these horrible decisions would now be the law of the land.

Anyway, here is the statement, which in my view has tucked in it much of the thinking that undercuts the force of a section of the left.

The Left Is Under No Obligation To Support Hillary Clinton

Breaking the cycle of lesser evilism

By 74 Members of Democratic Socialists of America

For decades, the dominant approach to electoral politics on the left has followed a now-familiar formula. The formula goes something like this: the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate leave much to be desired. They fall far short of our aspirations for a free and just society. Despite these shortcomings, however, the Republican Party and its candidate are far worse and will inflict much harm on the institutions and constituencies we care about. We have no illusions about the Democrats, but leftists and progressives should vote for them because the political terrain will be much more favorable to us with them in office. Once the threat from the right is defeated at the polls, we will mobilize to hold the Democrats accountable whenever they move to implement neoliberal and militaristic policies.

The astonishing rise of Donald Trump has ratcheted the intensity of this argument to an unprecedented level. His open racism and misogyny has pushed many on the left to rally, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign. We share the disgust and revulsion at Trump that so many have expressed to justify their support for Clinton, and our preference is for a Clinton victory—which at this point is highly likely. As such, socialists should campaign for whomever they want (or nobody at all) without being browbeaten, guilted, or privilege-baited.

Hillary Clinton is a staunch defender of the status quo, and will not be a friend of social movements and the left when in office. We think our time and energy is much better spent on building opposition to her administration now instead of canvassing votes for her.

In practice, campaigning for Clinton entails convincing people that she and her party will move to do a number of things—attacking the finance sector, opposing bad free trade deals, raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour, defending and expanding Social Security, etc.—they are not likely to do. Socialists should not undertake this work because it has the potential to undermine our efforts to build a base after the election, when all too often the promised effort to “hold the Democrats accountable” doesn’t materialize.

There is always a new threat from the right to rally against, a new opportunity to insist that maybe this election will really be different. More importantly, institutions like unions that would have the most capacity to enforce accountability pursue a self-preservation strategy that depends upon access to Democratic politicians. If forced to choose between confrontation and access, they will choose access—the same way that most of them chose Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.

Our dissatisfaction with the old formula goes beyond this seemingly endless presidential campaign. The choice on offer this November shows just how ineffective it has been on its own terms. For decades, Republicans have moved steadily to the right while most Democrats, with the votes of a potential left-wing base safely in their pockets, have moved ever further to the neoliberal center.

As a defensive strategy focused on protecting the institutional infrastructure of the left, it has been remarkably unsuccessful. One only has to look at the labor movement for a measure of its ineffectiveness—union political spending hits a new record high each election cycle, but union membership declines and working class living standards continue to crumble.

We agree with everyone else on the left that social movements are of critical importance. Militant and dynamic movements are absolutely necessary to disrupt the political system and foster the conditions for a new resurgence of the left. To that end, we participate in and support worker organizing campaigns, Black Lives Matter, minimum wage fights, and every struggle against racial, gender, and sexual oppression.

While social movements are a necessary condition for the emergence of a new left, they are not sufficient. A new left needs a new approach to electoral politics, an approach that takes seriously the need to build independent political formations—including new left-wing and socialist parties.

The US has a rich tradition of third party challenges to the two-party system, and they were not simply motivated by a sense of ethical purity. The Liberty and Free Soil parties helped to put abolition on the nation’s agenda, and contributed to the political fissures that resulted in the most successful third party in our history—the Republicans. After the Civil War, new parties of workers, farmers, populists, and socialists put demands for change on the agenda and propelled party militants into office at all levels of government, particularly at the state and local levels. Their success inspired a backlash resulting in the passage of “reforms” aimed at getting these forces out of politics—voter registration, high thresholds for ballot access, bans on fusion voting, etc. These laws, followed by integration of the labor movement into the New Deal coalition of the 1930s, led many on the left to conclude that independent political organization was a dead end. The formula that resulted—build social movements while voting for Democrats—continues to dominate today.

Advocates of the old formula often argue that the two main parties are simply lines on a ballot, or perhaps a “field of struggle” that the left can step on to and potentially win. While these parties are more loosely organized than their counterparts around the world, they still represent recognizable teams of interest groups, donors, and elected officials. While the Democrats and the Republicans have their respective popular bases, their organizational structures and funding networks are dominated by the rich and corporations. This means that each party will, by and large, choose issues and themes that reflect those interests. When Democratic leaders have to choose between articulating the interests of union members and people of color, or those of the financial, media, and technology elites that fund their campaigns, who usually wins? One only needs to compare the needs and preferences of the vast majority with the shape of actual policy to know the answer to that question.

We reject the realignment strategy that has guided much of the left’s electoral orientation for decades. We do not, however, call for an immediate and total break from voting for or supporting any Democratic candidate. We all fervently supported Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary, and recognize that he probably would have been a footnote to the campaign if he tried to run as an independent. Voting for Democratic candidates in specific state and local races can be justified in many circumstances.

But if we want to move beyond the cycle of mobilization and retreat that dominates left electoral activity in the US, we have no choice but to build our own political formations, as difficult as that will be. They will have to do what all parties do—run candidates for office, particularly in states and localities where competition between Democrats and Republicans is low. Considering the many institutional barriers to effective independent politics, they will also have to launch fights to change ballot access laws and other measures aimed at maintaining the two-party duopoly.

Beyond that, they should also focus on building the intellectual and organizational capacities of their base between elections, and raise people’s expectations of what is possible instead of managing them downward. And perhaps most importantly, they must resist the tendency of unions and other social movement organizations to prioritize short-term interests and goals above all other concerns.

The Sanders campaign and the mini-revival of protest activity shows us that millions of people are fed up with the political order and want an alternative to it. Instead of accepting and working within the limitations of the system they despise, why not begin the hard work of offering one to them?

Not sure what the point of asking Trump press secretary Saran Sanders to leave a restaurant in Washington by its owner is. But I do know that it quickly become raw meat for Trump and the right wing media to enrage their base, while turning off some people on our side who have issues with Trump and GOP. We should pick our fights wisely.

I like to think that the starting point of politics shouldn’t turn on what we think or what gins us up or what we are ready to do. But rather on what others, not in our orbit, think and are inclined to act on. But for too many on the left that isn’t their point of departure. Instead, politics is primarily a platform on which one showcases their political credentials and expresses their personal outrage. That it might be an arena, in which the primary task is to move people into action, based on what they think and are prepared to do, while, at the same time, not throwing any softballs that will further enrage and mobilize the opposition isn’t uppermost in their thinking.

Trump doubles down over the weekend on immigration with his insistence that immigrants be denied due process rights. He obviously thinks this will play well in the elections. We will have to prove him wrong.

I sometimes think that Trump’s calculus is that chaos at the border — not to mention in global markets and international relations — and his strong man persona will not only energize his base immediately, but in the end win support among other voters.

The rest of the world is far less malleable than Trump thinks. The world listens when he talks, but it doesn’t necessarily follow his instructions and dictates. It will bite back on occasion. Trade wars, we are finding out, cut in more than one way.

I lost my mother when I was a young boy, barely 9 years old. It was traumatic, sending me initially into a state of shock and denial. And that was followed by sadness, melancholy, and depression for a long time thereafter.

Even now more than 6 decades from that life changing moment, it’s still with me; it’s there, lodged in my psyche and still doing its mischief.

Time, it is said, heals all wounds. There is a grain of truth here, but it also contains an element of wishful thinking. In my case, time did offer some respite from the trauma of my sense of loss at so young an age. But what allowed me to metabolize my trauma (to the degree possible) was sustained and sensitive help from my family and neighbors in the first place, but even more from people trained to treat such trauma. In other words, therapy. My only regret is that it took me so long to seek out such help.

Which brings me to the children at the border who have been torn away from the mothers and fathers. What they are experiencing is unspeakable trauma, far worse than I did in so many ways. Not only are they terrified by the fear at this moment that they will never see their mother or father again.

But they also find themselves in an unfamiliar and unfriendly place, steel cages in some instances. And they are alone. No relatives or neighbors are at their side to comfort and assure them that things will get better, that their separation from their parents and family is only temporary. Instead they are in the hands of people, most of whom neither share their country of origin nor are of the same color. Who knows how many speak Spanish.

In short, these children and babies can’t help but feel a deep sense of isolation, alienation, powerlessness, fear, betrayal, sadness, and pain.

Even if these children are returned — and that isn’t a sure thing — to their mothers and fathers and receive professional help, the damage has been done and will likely be with them for a long time to come.

As one Catholic priest said yesterday, Trump’s policy fits the definition of evil in every way. I would only underscore that it’s an evil that’s indifferent to the terrible harm that it’s doing to thousands of children as well as steeped in racism and nativism and calculated to turn babies and children into bargaining chips to gin up his base for the fall elections.

It isn’t, as some suggest, to force through Congress a draconian immigration bill this week. My belief is that Trump and his quislings understand that that isn’t in the cards. Indeed, they want to keep the border and immigration on the table and in the news cycle for the fall elections. It’s a winning issue in their sordid calculus against Democrats who advocate, they claim, “open and porous borders.”

Finally, I would add that Trump aspires to be a strongman, much like the other strongmen in the world that he heaps praise on. And in turning children into fodder and thumbing his nose at the widespread opposition, including in his own party, to what he is doing at the border, he’s demonstrating in plain sight to the country and the world that, even in the most unfavorable of political circumstances, he is boss, that he isn’t bound by any restraints other than his own desires, that he can do whatever he wants. In this sense the border crisis is, in Trump’s eyes, an opportunity to assert his dominance over friend and foe, not a miscalculation. It’s something to be seized and unrelenting pushed. Blowback? Bring it on!

Our response can only be sustained resistance until this policy is changed and the children are returned to their mothers and fathers. it’s a test of our resolve.